Thursday, March 26, 2009

Not too bad at all…….

Hello dear reader. Here it is….the latest goings-on in the life of my wife (wahey!!! I’m a poet and I didn’t know it).

This morning, Dianne had a pre-chemo appointment at the CCI. This included blood work and a chat with the doctor. I suppose you’re all getting curiouser and curiouser about the results, so without further ado….here they are.

Good.

Thanks for coming, see ya next time.

Ok, well…if you’re reading this that means you didn’t fall for it. *sigh* I really need to work on that. Of course, if I’d have published at that point, what would ya’ll have done? Oh well, at least I’m laughing ^_^Here is the latest rundown: the blood work showed that her counts are perfect!! This means that she bounced back from the low / no immunity stage really well. This means that round 2 of chemo is going ahead as scheduled. Dianne will be going on steroids starting tonight. This is to promote white blood cell growth. They are starting this a bit early so that they can find out if she can handle the ‘roids. If she can’t, then the 2nd type of chemo (in the last 12 weeks) cannot be administered. The ‘roids are in pill form, so hopefully she’ll be able to keep them down over the next little while (post-chemo).

Dianne convinced them not to put on any anti-nausea meds, in light of how poorly she reacted to them last time around. It looks like Gravol will be the official drug of choice. We are both please that they agreed to this (although there was never really any concern that they wouldn’t).

The doctor did not mention anything about the results of her previous ultrasound, so we are assuming that no news is good news. And by good news, I mean that we are assuming that the cancer is contained at this point. Why did she not ask, you’re wondering? I think it slipped her mind…maybe when we’re at the CCI next, we can ask about it. Dianne will be going for another ultrasound in the near future just to see how things are progressing.

The only sort of bad but not really bad and not totally unexpected thing that we found out today is that the tumors have not shrunk at all. But, being only 3 weeks into treatment, we did not really expect anything else.And that, dear reader, is it for today. Both Dianne and I are in good spirits, and are remaining positive. The relative ease of the past 3 weeks surely does help one’s outlook on the whole thing. We are not expecting the journey to be as smooth as this, but at least now it is 3 weeks shorter.

Thank you to Gerda for giving Dianne a ride to the CCI this morning. Thank you to Arlene for babysitting Rebecca. And a special shout out goes to my buddy Ryan and his wife Dana. Dana is also a breast cancer patient, and is roughly at the same treatment time frame as Dianne. Stay strong, Ryan and Dana!! The four of us can go down this road together. Ryan, I’ll bring some homebrew over tonight.